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Happy birthday, BASIC

Posted by Steve Revill
Thu, 01 May 2014 07:24:00 GMT

To celebrate the 50th birthday of the BASIC programming language, we are very pleased to announce the release of RISC OS Pico. This is a very cut-down RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi that boots directly into BASIC, just like on the Beeb.

RISC OS Pico is available as a free download that can be installed onto pretty much any SD card, or you can buy it pre-installed from us for just a fiver.

BASIC was first unleashed upon the programming world in 1964, in a version known as Dartmouth BASIC. It became particularly popular in the 1980s when it was adopted as the built-in language of choice for the new wave of home computers. And of course, on Acorn hardware we had BBCBASIC, on the BBC Micro, which was aimed at British schoolchildren. Something which has obvious parallels to the Raspberry Pi today.

BBCBASIC lives on in RISC OS, albeit with many improvements and updates. Find out for yourself with RISC OS Pico.

Comments

I’ll be demonstrating the ‘core only’ RISC OS build on a Raspberry Pi with a 3" LCD screen at the Bristol RISC OS User Group on Wednesday 14th May. It will be running a 42 year old programme (one that was first written 42 years ago but not developed at all between 1989 [when I thought I had finished it] and May 2014).